Editorial

Education miracles that aren't

In seeking reform models, L.A. Unified should be cautious
about untested solutions.

February 6, 2013

Beware of education miracles. Too often, there's less there than meets
the eye. Remember the extraordinary gains in test scores and lowered
dropout rates in
Houston schools more than a decade ago? They became the model for the
federal No Child Left Behind Act and catapulted the schools'
superintendent, Rod Paige, to his position as U.S. secretary of Education
at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration. Only years later
was it discovered that schools were recording students as having
"transferred" when they had in fact dropped out, and that
students who were expected to do badly on standardized tests were often
kept from taking them.

Then there was Atlanta's schools superintendent, who won a national award
for the gains made by her students. That was before investigators
determined in 2011 that there had been rampant cheating by teachers and
principals throughout the school district.

Another much-touted miracle: charter schools, which were supposed to lead
the way to success for all students. Now, however, it seems that they
have a decidedly
mixed record.

A less-publicized addition to this list was the San Jose school district,
widely admired for its high
school graduation standard that requires all students to pass the
full series of 15 courses, known as the
A-G sequence, that qualifies them for
admission to California's four-year public universities. Supporters
cited San Jose's reported success when they persuaded the Los Angeles
Unified School District to adopt a similar requirement in 2005, phased in
so that this year's freshmen will be the first who must pass the
courses.

As it turns out, according to a
report last week in The Times, San Jose fudged its success rates by
counting students who had nearly completed the requirements. In addition,
many students either passed the courses with a D grade, which is not
accepted by the state universities, or took an escape route into the
district's
alternative schools, which have lesser requirements. All in all, the
proportion of students who qualify for the universities has barely budged
over the decade the policy has been in place. The one bit of good news:
Dropout rates did not increase, but probably in large part because
students didn't have to meet the true University of California and
California State University requirements.

The notion that all
Los Angeles high school students, no matter what their life plans,
should be required to pass those college-prep courses was always
problematic, even before the latest information about San Jose came to
light. It was a well-intentioned but hard-and-fast overreaction to a
shameful situation. In L.A. Unified, black and Latino students were
routinely shuffled into lower-track courses regardless of their academic
potential. At many inner-city schools, bright students with bigger
ambitions couldn't take all the necessary A-G courses even if they begged
to. Their neighborhood high schools didn't offer all the classes or, if
they did, math and science were frequently taught by underqualified
substitute teachers because most of the fully credentialed teachers used
their seniority to take openings at middle-class schools.

Something had to be done, but requiring all students to take the full
menu of college-prep courses was the wrong solution. Many high school
teachers in L.A. Unified already complain that they feel pressured to
pass students with Ds that haven't been earned. Starting next year,
freshmen will have to start passing those college-prep courses with Cs to
graduate.

L.A. Unified leaders say students will be offered extra support to help
them reach the higher standard. But San Jose school officials said the
same thing when they adopted their policy. The risk is that even with
more help, students will drop out or teachers will feel obligated to give
students C grades that they don't deserve, lest they be unable to
graduate. If that happens, students will qualify for admission to
universities where they can't do the required work, at a time when the
colleges themselves are under pressure to graduate higher proportions of
students.

In 2012, 12% of L.A. Unified's seniors were unable to pass the high
school exit exam, a test of basic 9th- and 10th-grade skills required for
a diploma in California. Though the district's pass rate has been
improving for years, this is a dramatically lower bar than the A-G
requirement. The district's students show little sign of being ready for
this big new step.

With new information in hand about the real numbers in San Jose, the L.A.
Unified school board should reconsider its policy. That doesn't mean
allowing the district's past to become the future. It could, for example,
make college-prep courses the default curriculum for all students but
give teenagers and their parents the option of requesting a waiver. It
could also adopt the parental "try just one bite" ploy by
requiring students to take a year of college-prep classes before being
allowed to switch to a more vocationally oriented program.

But the bigger message of the San Jose experience is that a single
example of a school reform miracle, whether it's a new test or a new
teacher evaluation system, is not the same as evidence-based, replicated,
time-tested educational change. It might offer an intriguing glimpse of
future possibilities, but it should not be widely adopted without proof
that it is necessary or helpful. This is something for the Obama
administration, with its insistence on teacher evaluations that include
"value added" scores on standardized tests, to remember. The
impatience with the status quo is commendable, but the search for silver
bullet solutions is leading schools in some dubious and possibly harmful
directions.

Adderall On Campus: Use And Abuse
A drug prescribed for ADHD is all over college campuses now. Weâ€™re
looking at the use and abuse of Adderall.

The United States has four percent of the worldâ€™s population, and
produces 88 percent of the worldâ€™s legal stimulant drugs. Including
Adderall, the amphetamine-based drug widely prescribed for ADHD,
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Impressive numbers.

But visit an American college campus, and really pay attention, and they
add up. Lots of young Americans, many with no ADHD, taking Adderall just
to focus.

To read. To write. To perform. Now thereâ€™s Adderall addiction and
suicide in the news, but itâ€™s bigger than that.